Do I buy the exact same one? Or do I buy different brand or what? I use the computer for deals, photo editing, that sort of stuff, some online gaming but not much. I found this current drive on amazon for around 49.99..... I just don't want to get something that isn't compatable or too much/too little for me...

I would NOT recommend buying the exact drive that you had before since it is obsolete.

You can use pretty much any 2.5" SATA hard drive, but I would suggest going with a Solid State Drive (SSD) instead. A 2.5" SATA SSD has the same form factor and uses the same interface, but operates at much faster speeds than mechanical hard drives. This will provide a noticeable improvement in performance.

You will probably have to give up some storage capacity though. 120GB - 256GB SSDs are currently the best value, anything larger will cost a lot of money and anything smaller doesn't save much money.

The old drive doesn't "work". The laptop won't boot. Started with a startup disc drive error, but would startup and freeze. Then wouldn't start up at all, could only access the boot menu.... Ran diagnostics and got a hard disc drive failed error. over and over and over. So we took it out and hooked it up to the desktop and transferred the data to the external. Its not working, we were just able to recover most of the stuff off it. If I'm having issues with it right now- do I really want to take the chance that it will happen again?

these are 5400 rpm- mines 7200 won't it be slower or will I even notice? And how/where do I find out if they are compatible with my computer?
Thanks for the links!

The old drive doesn't "work". The laptop won't boot. Started with a startup disc drive error, but would startup and freeze. Then wouldn't start up at all, could only access the boot menu.... Ran diagnostics and got a hard disc drive failed error. over and over and over. So we took it out and hooked it up to the desktop and transferred the data to the external. Its not working, we were just able to recover most of the stuff off it. If I'm having issues with it right now- do I really want to take the chance that it will happen again?

these are 5400 rpm- mines 7200 won't it be slower or will I even notice? And how/where do I find out if they are compatible with my computer?
Thanks for the links!

You can spend a bit more to get a 7200RPM drive if you want, but if performance is important to you, then you should get a SSD.

Any 2.5" SATA SSD should work in your computer. Your current drive is 9.5mm in height (the most common), so you aren't restricted to the smaller 7mm thick drives but you might not want to take a chance on some of the high capacity, thicker drives.

You can spend a bit more to get a 7200RPM drive if you want, but if performance is important to you, then you should get a SSD.

This.

If you're not really an intensive PC user (i.e. you don't game, really just check your emails, maybe play basic games like chess) then capacity shouldn't be a concern at all for you. As such, performance is always worth the trade off in these cases.

Watch newegg.com and tigerdirect for a sale on a SSD drive for under $100, they happen fairly often (usually $80-$90). You may only get around 100gb of space after installation, but you won't really care if you don't save giant files like movies and games.

This Thread is more than 742 days old. It is very likely that it does not need any further discussion and thus bumping it serves no purpose.If you still feel it is necessary to make a new reply you may do so.
I am aware that this Thread is rather old but I still want to make a reply.

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